The American Dream: A Perfect Idea for Dark Times?

“The American Dream” is one of those phrases that’s so familiar that it’s borderline embarrassing to realize one doesn’t quite know where it came from. Yet there I was, a few months ago, crossing the border into embarrassment as I realized that I could not call the etymology of the phrase to mind.

The meaning I knew well enough — the future is supposed to be better than the past, and we can make it so by hard work — but the coinage itself was a mystery. And so discovering that it was a product of the early 1930s — a time of enormous crisis — was illuminating. The coiner, the historian James Truslow Adams, was writing at a disorienting moment in the years after the Crash of 1929, an era in which the future of democratic capitalism was in doubt.

That the power and clarity of a phrase that captured so much of what had — and has — set America apart in terms of liberty and opportunity could come from the gloom of a Great Depression made me feel rather better about things in our own time.

Here’s hoping a dream born in adversity will sustain us through these dispiriting days.